Collaborative Knowledge Creation and Student-Led Assignment
Design: Wikipedia in the University Literature Class

Abstract

This case study outlines how writing for Wikipedia can benefit students in an
undergraduate literature class by having them undertake scholarly research, read
unmediated texts, and write for a real-life audience. In keeping with the
collaborative spirit of Wikipedia, the rubrics provided here were primarily
created by the class as a whole. Estill demonstrates how this assignment
encouraged students to question received notions of literary canon and to engage
critically with Wikipedia itself. Perhaps paradoxically, writing for Wikipedia
gave students ownership of their writing and research. Ultimately, this
assignment facilitated students to become experts on understudied topics and
helped them learn about how to do literary research.

“But my other professors told me not to use Wikipedia!” my class chorused, upon
hearing that we were going to be writing Wikipedia entries. In an unscientific straw poll conducted through a show
of hands, they all admitted to using the online encyclopedia despite their
professors’ warnings.[1] This article explores the benefits of and
rationale for having students in a literature class write Wikipedia articles[2]: in this case, students in a third-year
Renaissance Drama class analyzed existing Wikipedia articles about early modern
plays, devised the rubric for how their articles would be evaluated, adopted and
researched a play, presented their work to the class, and had the option of
publishing their writing on Wikipedia. Ultimately, being part of the assignment
design process and writing for a public audience led students to undertake primary
research, to question received ideas of literary canon, and to take ownership of
their writing. This research-based writing project relies on the digital humanities
principle of having student-scholars leverage digital publication in order to
participate in social knowledge creation that benefits both the students and the
larger (often academic) community.

This is not the first article about using Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool. For years,
advocates have touted Wikipedia’s usefulness in composition classrooms [Haley-Brown 2012]
[Vetter 2014]. The “Wikipedia Education
Program” that encourages “educators and students around the world to contribute to
Wikipedia… in an academic setting”
[Wikipedia Education Program 2016].[3] The Wikipedia Education Program offers
instructors guidelines on “How
to Use Wikipedia as a teaching tool,” with sample assignments
and case studies by professors who have successfully had students write, edit,
expand, or translate Wikipedia articles. Professors who ask students to write for
Wikipedia agree that having an actual public audience for their writing galvanizes
students to research more thoroughly and to write better [Kill 2012].
Recent academic interventions have focused on the need for clearly theorized and
inclusive (of race, gender, sexuality, language, and more) approaches to this
digital platform [Edwards 2015]
[Gruwell 2015]
[Koh and Risam 2013]. Indeed, as Amanda I. Seligman argues, writing for
encyclopedias is a scholarly and valuable pursuit [Seligman 2013].
Erin Glass points out that “the benefits of integrating NPS [Networked
Participatory Scholarship] in higher and graduate education are clear”; yet
too few undergraduate literature classes take this approach [Glass 2015]. This case study serves as an example and template of how writing for Wikipedia
can be productively incorporated into an undergraduate literature course.

With over three hundred classes that have used the Wikipedia Education program, and
many others classes that were not officially affiliated with the program that also
wrote articles, why do we need an article about Wikipedia in the university
literature classroom? Because discipline-based Wikipedia editing initiatives have
been very successful pedagogically. The American Sociological Association has had
more than 3,300 students write and edit Wikipedia articles, with three goals: “(a) to develop communication skills for general audiences;
(b) to discover the importance of logic, strength of argument, flow and
clarity of writing, and the need to cite the appropriate literature; and
(c) to experience the significance of accuracy in scientific writing”
[Vandendorpe 2015]. As outlined below, by writing for Wikipedia, literature students can gain
general and transferable research and communication skills, while also considering
the nature of digital texts (particularly hypertext and ontologies) and literary
texts (with a focus on canon and textual studies). Furthermore, the assignment
outlined here takes the collaborative nature of Wikipedia’s platform one step
further: students collaboratively created their own learning goals by choosing the
rubric on which their Wikipedia articles would be graded.

Writing for Wikipedia in a literature classroom engages students to question the
literary canon, to consider the role of editors and editions, and to undertake
research using primary and secondary sources. As is often the case with writing
Wikipedia articles, this research and writing helped students develop a sense of
mastery of the material and provided exigence for real-world writing. The stakes of
defining a literary canon and understanding editorial interventions are always high,
but especially so when confronting Renaissance Drama, that literary period and genre
dominated by Shakespeare.

Almost ten years ago, Michael Best surveyed information about Shakespeare studies on
Wikipedia, and found that, predictably, Wikipedia “does a good job of dealing with
the facts about [Shakespeare’s] life and works, and provides some good starting
places for further studies in the main articles,” yet, “as links take the intrepid explorer into the byways of
Early Modern minor writers the quality becomes more uneven”
[Best 2006, 109, 114]. Best concludes by exhorting Shakespeare Newsletter
readers to “take the plunge and wade into Wikipedia waters to update,
improve, and extend the information Wikipedia is making available to our
students, and to the world”
[Best 2006, 114]. A decade later, Best’s call to action still holds true: “minor
writers” and anonymous works are often entirely overlooked. As Matthew
Steggle notes, “Wikipedia’s coverage of the Renaissance varies considerably
from article to article and even within articles”
[Steggle 2010]. In writing Wikipedia articles about these lesser-known plays, my students
responded to a genuine need — they were not writing the traditional paper for an
audience of one, the professor. The professor-as-audience is, furthermore, someone
who presumably already knows the material, whereas those reading a Wikipedia article
are actively seeking new knowledge. Writing for Wikipedia means students have to
consider what readers might know before coming to that particular article; they
learn to consider audience and rhetorical situation in concrete ways that improves
their writing.

Before the digital age, scholars attempted to make early modern plays accessible by
editing and publishing editions that would not, like the original playbooks, be
safeguarded in rare book rooms. Digital projects followed this model, making works
findable and searchable in even more ways. Early digital projects began with
canonical texts: for instance, Best founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) in 1996, to meet the demand for scholarly, edited,
online versions of Shakespeare’s plays [Best 2012]. In 2015, Brett D.
Hirsch launched Digital
Renaissance Editions (DRE), a
“kindred project” that moves beyond Shakespeare’s plays to
publish works by lesser-known or anonymous authors, including John Redford, Walter
Mountfort, and Richard Edwards [Hirsch 2015]
[Hirsch 2011].[4] Wikipedia has traced a similar trajectory:
the earliest and most detailed entries deal with canonical authors and plays. I
contend that Wikipedia entries not only reflect the current literary canon but also
help to shape it. As a first stop for undergraduates, graduate students, and even at
times professors [Knight and Pryke 2012], Wikipedia offers at-a-glance
information that can be used as a starting point: and without even a
“stub” (a short placeholder article that needs to be
expanded), overlooked works are absent from the literary landscape and commonly- and
communally-held cultural narrative Wikipedia presents.[5]
Without conscious interventions such as this that seek to expand the canon,
Wikipedia and other digital projects will only reinscribe our existing canon [Earhart 2012].[6]

Many undergraduate literature students have never heard the term
“canon.” They have not questioned why there are entire
courses listed in the university catalogue about Shakespeare, yet none on Ben Jonson
or Mary Sidney. Students instinctively want to begin any written assignment with
“William Shakespeare is the greatest writer of English literature” (or
words to that effect), while instructors help students see the historical reasons
the Bard has been positioned over other writers. Finding and researching
understudied plays for Wikipedia helped students start to question the shape of the
English literary canon and consider how anthologies and university course catalogues
reify canon.[7]

In the spirit of Wikipedia, students collaboratively created the rubric on which
their assignment would be graded. I determined that a portion of their grade would
be established by their presentations and their pre-research. The bulk of the
pre-research was a short “Wikipedia Analysis,” where they
analyzed existing articles about Renaissance plays and evaluated what made the
articles most useful (see “Process Elements” in the rubric in
Appendix A). I encouraged students to read the Wikipedia pages about the plays we
were reading that semester. Some of the questions they considered were: “What
should every Wikipedia page about a Renaissance play have? What headings? What
information?” and “What kind of notes are most useful? What sources are
cited?” When prompted to suggest which articles would make good or bad
templates, the response was almost unanimous: lots of plays we read that semester
had strong Wikipedia pages (such as The Spanish Tragedy
and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside), but The Tragedy of Mariam, the only play we read by a female
author, had an inadequate page. This led students to discuss the treatment of women
writers both historically and today.[8] Reading the well-written write-ups,
furthermore, gave students valuable background information that allowed them to
engage with the canonical texts we studied in deeper ways. Much of the information
on a Wikipedia page about a Renaissance play will appear in a modern introduction to
that play; reading either an introduction or a Wikipedia page can be a passive
experience. Analyzing Wikipedia pages, however, encouraged students to think about
the value and reasoning behind the information presented. Furthermore, as we
discussed together in class, with its hyperlinking, Wikipedia can facilitate deeper
research than a print introduction: students can be easily drawn into related fields
of inquiry as they click through to new pages on (literally and figuratively) linked
topics.

After handing in their 300-500 word Wikipedia Analysis, students brainstormed in
class what makes an effective Wikipedia page on a Renaissance play and what headings
and content need to appear in the page. We grouped their suggestions into categories
and finalized their rubric for the written component (see Appendix A). This
assignment gave students ownership over their material in two ways: one, they were
responsible for a play that nobody else would read; and two, they decided the
desired outcomes for this assignment by collaboratively creating the rubric.[9] Students determined that introductions
to each play needed to contain some basic, key information (when available): the
play’s title and alternative titles, genre, playwright(s), setting, initial
performance information (date, company, theatre, patron, occasion), and initial
publication information (date, publisher, location). This is the kind of information
that students take for granted: they skim over it when reading a play’s
introduction; they glance at it on Wikipedia. Finding this information when it is
not made readily available, however, gave students the opportunity to undertake true
scholarly research. Students also start to see the holes or slippages in the
narratives we have of Renaissance theatre history: often, scholars cannot agree on
where or when a play was first performed, let alone who wrote it.

Before they could undertake their research, however, students had to adopt a play. I
gave students a list of eighty-nine plays that had no Wikipedia pages (or, in some
cases, stubs).[10] As their guidelines read, “There’s no Wikipedia page,
and you can’t read all of these... so what should you do?” (see Appendix B).
I suggested they pick two or three plays based on their title and do a little
research on the play. I also advised choosing a play they could access in a way they
would feel comfortable. In order to adopt a play, each had to locate an edition:
some chose plays that can only be found on Early English Books Online (EEBO), Literature Online (LiOn), or in facsimile reprints of the first editions, whereas others
opted to read plays that were recently recuperated by online publication (some
edited, some not) in Early Modern Literary Studies or Risa Stephanie
Bear’s Renascence Editions.[11]EEBO and LiOn are both
subscription resources that we were fortunate to have access to at my institution,
but they are not required for completing this assignment: HathiTrust, Google Books, and the Internet Archive are online repositories
that have open-access editions of early modern plays: sometimes, even, facsimiles of
the original publication.[12]

As the plays my students adopted were generally under-studied, my students had to
learn both new ways of reading and new research methods. For many, this was the
first time facing an unedited early modern text: for students used to anthologies of
Shakespeare, even the non-standard orthography could come as a surprise. Some
students learned that act and scene breaks could be editorial. By comparing how
plays have been historically treated (or ignored), my class began asking questions
about scholarly editing, that is, about how the texts we read are mediated in ways
we often take for granted.

Beyond reading the play itself in order to write a summary, students had to undertake
primary research to write the introductory paragraph about their play. As we had
established, a good Wikipedia entry always gave a play’s initial publication, and,
when known, details about the first performance, such as the company, theatre, and
date. I devoted an entire 50-minute class and to how to research their plays.
Although my students undertook research using primary and secondary materials, this
assignment did not violate Wikipedia’s “no original research”
policy, which “all material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable,
published source”: it did, however, challenge the standard research
undergraduates are asked to undertake.[13] I
encouraged students to use both print tools such as the Annals
of English Drama
[Harbage et al. 1989] and the Records of Early English
Drama[14] and online resources like the Database of Early
English Playbooks and the English Short Title Catalogue. In their
assignments, students favored digital resources over print: none, for instance,
cited The London Stage (a suggested resource about
performance history).[15] All, however, learned to navigate The Database of Early English Playbooks, and many turned
to The Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography and Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography.

As a class, we looked at EEBO to find what the physical
play-texts looked like. Upon finding that we had access to three digital facsimiles
of Samuel Daniel’s The Tragedie of Cleopatra in quarto,
my student who adopted this play exclaimed, “I’m going to compare all three!”
The last portion of the research methods class was devoted to finding secondary
sources, an important skill that would also serve them in good stead for their other
university classes. Although scholars talk about digital natives,[16] in this class period I was reminded that
students do not actually have an innate understanding of how to search for things
effectively. Searching, however, is not endemic to online sources, and students
similarly needed guidance with how to search using print sources. Showing students
how to find the information they seek and discern its value (rather than telling
them the answers) empowers them to come up with even more exciting research
questions. Furthermore, these research skills are foundational to writing a
Wikipedia article.

Equipped with the ability to use new research tools, students had two main parts of
the assignment to complete: write the Wikipedia page, and present about their play
in class. We all know the old adage that you learn something best by teaching. In
this context, student presenters benefited from having an in-person audience to
speak to as well as their online audience. As audience members, students learned
about a variety of plays and genres that we would not have had time to all read
together, including domestic tragedy, farce, roman history, and pastoral. Taken
together, these presentations offered an overview of English Renaissance drama that
no single anthology could provide. Indeed, students in this class gained a more
realistic view of what was actually available to audiences in Shakespeare’s day, as
well as the key genres that preceded and followed.

For their presentations, I encouraged students not to give a plot synopsis. Some,
however, could not resist the temptation, as they had put in quite an effort to
learn all of the details of, in some cases, very intricate plots. Others, however,
managed to keep to the main points we wanted to hear: the themes in the play, why
this play is interesting (or not), and why this play has been neglected so
far.[17] For instance, one student who
discussed Ben Jonson’s The Irish Masque at Court,
taught the class about masques, those performances designed especially for the King
or Queen; she also explained Ireland’s political turmoil in the early modern period,
and, most importantly for this text, examined the English audience’s attitudes
towards the Irish and the anticipated reactions to Jonson’s harsh portrayal of
uneducated, ill-mannered, and ridiculous-accented Irish. Exploring non-canonical
plays led to student-driven discussions that reflected on an array of primary
sources and that truly supported classroom dialogue and critical thinking.

During these presentations, I discovered that my students had taken the
“adopt” a play metaphor seriously. Some students felt
protective of their plays and wanted to justify their play as worth studying. One
student wrote about Cupid’s Whirligig, a city comedy by
Edward Sharpham that nobody reads.[18] She expressed
her shock that Cupid’s Whirligig was not regularly
taught or anthologized. This possessiveness, born of truly caring about the texts
they read, was a recurring theme in the presentations. Upper-level English majors
were, some for the first time, grappling with ideas of canonicity because they had
identified gaps in both in the curriculum and what seems like Wikipedia’s universal
content.

Reading non-canonical works, presenting “their” adopted play to
the class, and writing for Wikipedia gave students an incentive to excel:
specifically, writing for Wikipedia increased the exigency of their work, as they
were addressing an actual lacuna. As Wikipedia advertises, writing in the classroom
can be “the end of throwaway assignments and the beginning of real-world
impact for student editors” (emphasis in the original). These students created Wikipedia articles that, in some cases,
actually contributed to a broader knowledge community.

I qualified my previous assertion about student contributions because I did not
require that students publish their writing on Wikipedia. Asking students to share
their work, even pseudonymously, is an ethical quandary. Posting on Wikipedia is
different from, for instance, our course website: on a course website, I can protect
all of the material by requiring a password and, even if the site were open-access,
it would not get much traffic. As
Wikipedia acknowledges, it is one of the most popular sites on the
internet. Ultimately, I required students to write a Wikipedia-style article, but I
did not require them to post it to the online encyclopedia for credit.[19] Some students creatively formatted their word document
submissions, such as this entry on The Costlie Whore — a
title I would not suggest Googling, as there is still no Wikipedia article on this
anonymous play from 1632 (see Figure 1). Even though posting to Wikipedia was
optional, about a third of my students gave it a try. Those students, on their own,
created a Wikipedia username and learned enough about the wiki markup to upload
their articles.[20] See Figure 2 and Figure 3 for images of
the opening of Wikipedia articles my students wrote about Johan Johan the Husband and The
Dumb Knight.

Initially, some of the write-ups my students created and uploaded to Wikipedia were
marked as “orphans,” that is to say, no other pages linked to
them. Even though students were not required to upload their work to Wikipedia, we
talked about how they should categorize their plays and where their articles should
both link to and be linked from. They had to indicate what links they would include
even if they handed in their paper in a word document. While most students were able
to include appropriate links, many did not understand the “categories” of articles
on Wikipedia, nor what the benefit of linking to your page versus
from the page might be. Uploading new pages to Wikipedia (and
writing as if your work were to be uploaded) leads students to consider how to
classify information. Exploring ontologies and taxonomies — those categories that we
apply (“1631 plays”) or sometimes choose not to apply
(“plays published in quarto”) when creating a Wikipedia
page — helps students approach disciplinary knowledge systems. Wikipedia’s categories
makes assumptions about how users will navigate the pages and what might interest
them; Wikipedia’s explicit organization can prompt students to interrogate implicit
ontologies in literary studies.

Adding new Wikipedia pages about early modern plays includes other people beyond the
classroom in the learning experience and can lead students to continue to learn
beyond the short time they are in class. As the revision history of a page created by a student on Thomas Heywood’s
The Fayre Mayde of the Exchange demonstrates, a
dozen Wikipedians read and edited the page (see Figure 5): most of the
post-assignment edits involved normalizing the spelling to American, and, yes,
sometimes adding or changing the categories. Beyond those Wikipedians who actively
edited the text, there are the users who simply read this page and made no changes,
which we cannot track. Perhaps most impressively, the most recent update to the page
(15 November 2014, Renaissancefan) is from the same person who created it in 2012:
no longer a student, this person is still engaging with the texts and ideas from
their class. Although it might seem counterintuitive, writing for Wikipedia — that is,
putting your work on the internet for all to use and change — can allow students to
feel intellectual ownership. Renaissancefan is not just a consumer of knowledge
shared by a professor, but an expert contributing to broader discussions.

With her Wikipedia page on The Fayre Maid of the
Exchange, Renaissancefan is participating in collaborative authorship.
Steggle suggests that we can perhaps better understand models of early modern
writing by engaging with Wikipedia:

It is one thing to know that, in principle, Renaissance
drama is at home with co-authored, repatched plays; with plays that
plagiarize pieces of earlier plays; and with plays that change radically
from version to version. But to realize that we happily use Wikipedia
articles whose status is comparable helps us to see how well that might work
in practice.
[Steggle 2010]

We might tell students about the highly collaborative practice of writing
early plays for a public audience; this assignment helps students engage with the
largest collaborative writing project ever undertaken. Of course, all collaborative
modes of writing are not the same: an early modern playwright revising an older work
is not the same as a student contributing to Wikipedia. That said, writing for
Wikipedia can help students think of authorship models beyond the often fallacious
idea of the single-author-genius.

Admittedly, writing about Renaissance plays on Wikipedia is a finite project. At some
point in the future, all the plays listed in the Database of
Early English Playbooks could have complete entries. If and when that
halcyon day comes, class projects in this field can move to new related topics that
are not yet covered adequately, such as royal progresses and processions, acting
companies and actors, and even manuscript sources for early modern drama. The future
of digital pedagogy projects that promote editing Wikipedia is, at its heart, one
that both defines and reflects future avenues for scholarship.

This article has demonstrated the concrete benefits of having students write pages
for Wikipedia, including self-motivated learning, improved communication skills,
writing for a real-life audience, and undertaking scholarly research. Some of the
benefits to writing articles discussed here are field specific, such as reading
unedited plays, considering notions of literary canon, and exploring how and what we
study as literary scholars. Beyond the values that Wikipedia itself touts and those
discipline-specific skills that students gained, this assignment fosters critical
thinking about Wikipedia itself: what’s in, what’s out, and what these bounds
suggest about our cultural values. Learning about Wikipedia prompts students to
question how other, sometimes seemingly monolithic, sites are conceptualized and
created, as manifested in our class discussions. Analyzing Wikipedia also promotes
what might be called digital civic engagement: this kind of action can help make
digital spaces more inclusive and representative, although this is currently an
uphill battle.

Even after writing their own Wikipedia pages, my class agreed that for final papers,
Wikipedia was best used in the pre-research phase, and not cited in the
bibliography. As I overheard one of my students comment to a classmate on the way
out of class, “this is more work than a research paper.” Yes, doing scholarly
research, reading unmediated texts, and writing for a real-life audience is work: it
is the work we undertake as literary scholars. As the students in my Renaissance
Drama proved, students are eager to learn to undertake real literary scholarship
when we offer them the chance to gain and share their expertise by writing for
Wikipedia.

Appendix A: Rubric

This appendix presents the Rubric used. I assigned the process elements and
presentation elements values. (CourseRoster was about joining our class wiki and
learning to participate in discussion.) My students developed the “WikiProject
Written Component” section of the rubric as well as the explanatory
information.

The Handout is the handout you give on the day of
presentations. Please make enough for the whole class (21 including the
instructor). This handout should include key points about the play, including a
brief (one paragraph) summary. Other key points include authorship, performance
venue, and when the play was written, performed, and published. Elements from
your handout can be taken from your WikiProject. You can also include other
useful information like character charts, timelines, plot graphs, etc.

Please include at least one image on the handout: at minimum, please include an
image of the play's title page, which you can get from Early English Books
Online (EEBO, available through the UVic library page).

Remember to add a bibliography of the play (are there multiple editions? Is there
an edition that is most useful?) as well as secondary sources (including online)
that were most useful to your presentation.

You can choose to do an “online handout” by creating a wiki
page/prezi/powerpoint for your presentation and including all of the above. You
can also choose a "mixed handout" that presents some material online and some
material on paper. If you choose to include a digital component, you will need
to send the link to me, which I will circulate to the whole class.

The presentation grade will account for your "stage" presence (the clarity of
your discussion, the way you present yourself) as well as the content of the
presentation. Part of your presentation grade will also include the "interest"
factor: is your presentation interesting?

Part of your presentation grade will reflect the research, effort, and
preparation that you undertook. The content of your presentation should
introduce the class to a new play and hit the salient points above.

You will hand in a page with your discussion questions at the end of your
presentation. You will need to come up with at least 3 questions about your
play, author, period, etc. You might consider giving a short piece of text (14
lines or less--even a couplet would be strong) and asking a question about a
particular textual moment.

This should include both the primary source (editions of the play), bibliographic
sources (like the Annals or Greg's Bibliography or the Database of
Early English Playbooks), as well as any secondary sources (that is,
literary criticism)

This includes the links you would want to have to other articles. What
connections/comparisons are you drawing?

This also includes how you suggest bookmarking your own page and the
categories you would like to include on your page.

Please also include a list of places you would add links to your page.
(This can be in a note to me at the end of your essay)

Remember: you might want to include target links to pages on Wikipedia
that do not exist. This is tantamount to suggesting a page be created. (You
can indicate this to me in a note in your word document or simply create the
links, which will appear red, on your Wikipedia page.)

You can choose any of the plays below. You can also propose to write about a play
that isn’t on this list. If you choose to write about a play that is not on this
list, please send me an email with the title, date, and author (if known) of the
play you’d like to adopt. Then include a short explanation of why the wikipedia
article needs expanding or why this play should be considered.

If you want to buy a copy, make sure that you’re not buying an OCR’d
version of the play; be sure you’re buying an edited version. (If you want
an OCR’d play, you can get that for free from Literature Online via the
library.)

Consider: do you need a physical copy? Can you work with Literature Online
and Early English Books Online?

You will be able to find a facsimile of your play (likely the first
edition, which could be difficult to read) via EEBO.

These plays have short Wikipedia articles. If you want to write about one of
these, send me a short email that explains why the Wikipedia article is lacking
and how you plan to improve it. Some of these (especially the Jonson plays) have
a lot of secondary criticism and so would be very challenging choices.

Thomas Goffe - The Tragedy of Orestes

John Marston - Jack Drum’s Entertainment

Jonson - Sejanus

Jonson - Catiline

Marston - The Dutch Courtesan

Marston - Sophonisba (The Wonder of Women)

Marston - Histriomastix

Marston - What you Will

Notes

[1] I would like to thank Diane Jakacki, Sarah Potvin,
Kailin Wright, Emily Murphy, and Shannon Smith for their insightful advice that
helped make this a better paper. In 2010, Alison J. Head and Michael B.
Eisenberg demonstrated that 52% of university students used Wikipedia
“always” or “frequently” when
undertaking research related to their courses. This figure rises to 75% when we
include students who “occasionally” use Wikipedia [Head and Eisenberg 2010].

[2]
This paper builds on the extensive scholarship by scholars on the value of
writing for Wikipedia in the composition class. See especially [Cummings 2009].

[3] As their site explains, the WEP is “run by Wikimedia chapters,
affiliate organizations, and dedicated volunteers worldwide”
[Wikipedia Education Program 2016].

[4] As Steggle has argued, it is not just editions,
but also bibliographical data that lead to canon development [Steggle 2008]. Some of the strongest digital resources for
researching Renaissance drama have begun to challenge notions of canonicity by
offering inclusive (if bounded) content, such as the Database of Early
English Playbooks (DEEP) and
the forthcoming Compendium of Renaissance Drama
(CORD) [Lesser and Farmer 2007][Corrigan 2015].

[5] Although Wikipedia
might lack write-ups about Renaissance playwrights and their works, these are
often listed (without links) in the “List of Years in
Literature” page, which links to specific pages such as
“1607 in literature.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_years_in_literature.

[9]
Having students behave as experts in both the genre of writing and the topic
they wrote on draws on Dorothy Heathcote’s drama in education technique,
“Mantle of the Expert.” Although students are not experts
when they embark on this assignment, in a university classroom, they can truly
become experts (whereas Heathcote anticipated an audience of younger students).
See [O'Neill 2015].

[10] For my list of plays and instructions on how to choose a play,
see Appendix B. I generated this list using DEEP.
As of this writing, some of these plays now have write-ups (including those by
my students).

[11] As of this writing,
both Renascence Editions and Early Modern Literary Studies sites have not been maintained in
years, and so have broken links that the students needed to navigate in order to
find their plays, or, in some cases, turn to another resource.

[12] HathiTrust has some of its material freely
available, but some books are accessible only by users at subscribing
institutions.

[16] For a
discussion of the problematic understanding of “digital
natives” that proposes a more nuanced view of undergraduate
knowledge and preparation, see Erika E. Smith’s The Digital
Native Debate in Higher Education
[Smith 2012].

[17] Each presentation was short, only 4-5 minutes, but it was followed by
3-4 minutes of discussion. The presenters prepared three questions for
discussion and also solicited questions from the class. When I teach this
assignment again, I will give a sample presentation on a play that we have not
read together in order to offer students some models for how to initiate a
discussion about a work that their audience has not read. Some of the best
techniques students used include linking their play to plays we read as a class,
aligning the play to historical events, or giving a short passage or paratext
(such as the title page) to discuss.

[18] As I was writing this article, I could not
remember who wrote this obscure play, so I did what everyone does: I googled it.
The Wikipedia page my student wrote was the first result.

[19]
Personally, I have had students request to have their written assignments
removed from publicly facing websites when they went on the job market; allowing
students the choice to publish their work (rather than requiring it) is
respectful of their privacy and ability to make decisions. HASTAC (Humanities,
Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) suggests that students
be encouraged to write under a pseudonym and not be required to publish their
work online because of legal ramifications, including America’s FERPA: Family
Education Rights and Privacy Act [HASTAC 2015]. Erin Glass
acknlowledges that “privacy, control, and ownership” are not yet
“adequately addressed” in relation to online student writing [Glass 2015]. Neither Glass nor this HASTAC post focuses on
Wikipedia, which allows students to publish pseudonymously. This assignment
does, however, participate in what Glass terms “Networked Participatory
Scholarship” by being “open, peer centric, user-friendly (comparatively), and
enabl[ing] users to engage with exponentially larger networks”
[Glass 2015].

[20] Of those who chose to post to Wikipedia, not a single student
emailed me for technical help. On the course website, I provided Wikipedia’s
help documents for writing articles and creating a user account. The students
who wanted to learn the Wikimedia markup system had not used it before, but were
self-selecting and self-taught.